Will Barack Obama parachute into Mile High Stadium to accept the Democratic nomination?

Unlike fans of movies like The Sting, who laugh along with con-men while they bilk some unsympathetic rube, I never thought Barack Obama was funny.

Obama's waffling about NAFTA was obviously unfunny way back in March, but he waited until Hillary Clinton conceded before he made it obvious enough for the naive "youth vote" that gave him the nomination.

Obama's right-wing support for an individual right to bear arms was obviously unfunny way back in February, but he waited until Hillary Clinton conceded before he made it obvious enough to wake up the New York Times.

Obama still wasn't funny when he did a 180 degree back-flip about FISA and flip-flopped about public campaign financing, and even out-pandered George W. Bush by offering Jerusalem to AIPAC and finally made his unprincipled political gamesmanship obvious enough even for blind-faith Obamabots like Paul Woodward at War in Context.

It wasn't even funny to me when tens of thousands of Obama's most dedicated supporters on my.barackobama.com petitioned Obama to oppose the God-awful FISA bill while Markos Moulitsas was simultaneously telling them to forget about trying to run the circus from their seats in the peanut gallery.

But when Obama topped it all off by deciding that not even the gigantic Pepsi Convention Center in Denver is gigantic enough for a cosmic event like the nomination of Barack Obama, and the Democratic National Convention has to be turned into a political Super Bowl by staging it in the super-gigantic Mile High Stadium...

Now that's funny.

But it would be even funnier if this super-gigantic nomination never happened, and the super-delegates locked up the Convention until it nominated a really principled Democrat like Chris Dodd, who was filibustering against warrantless wire-tapping while Barack Obama was planning a colossal freak-show in Denver.

Who would have thought that a dedicated Obama-doubter like me would post a diary that's almost nothing but a quote from Markos Moulitsas, but here it is:

"The Obama campaign is still very much a top-bottom operation. They've made it very easy for people to hop on the bandwagon, but those in the back of that wagon still get no say in where the campaign is going."

Bob Ostertag posted this quote in an article on Common Dreams, without a link, and it was surprisingly hard to track down, but as of right now the New York Times article in which it appears is posted on my.barackobama.com, where the largest group of posters is trying to pressure Obama to do the right thing about the FISA bill, as Mr. Ostertag also explains in his excellent article.

It isn't every day that even a self-important and formerly fairly good newspaper like the Washington Post announces "the truth" about a contentious issue like Barack Obama's religion, but now we have it from their otherwise undistinguished staff writer Eli Sastrow, who was only recently promoted from reporting on swimming, where his cosmic insight was wasted on stories like Ziegler Sets Meet Mark in 400 Freestyle.

Lately the Post has been dispatching the Jimmy Olsen of their national news desk to hotspots like Flag City, Ohio, where he finds a few rubes who are so amazingly stupid that they haven't figured out the truth about Barack Obama!

On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

This set-up illustrates the keen analytic skills that Mr. Sastrow honed at swim meets from Petaluma to Podunk: Either you believe that Barack Obama is a "Christian family man," or you believe he's a "gay Muslim racist." Which sounds more reasonable to you?

Mr. Sastrow also slips in another bogus distinction that old media outlets like the Washington Post would love to see us all accept: The "truth" belongs to newspapers, TV news, and even campaign advertisements, and the internet is dismissed along with other rumor mills like grocery stores and auto shops.

But in spite of the awesome authority of the Washington Post (Colin Powell's speech about Saddam's WMDs was "irrefutable") I can't quite accept that the difficult question of Barack Obama's religion is reducible to a ludicrous contrast between "Christian family man" and "gay Muslim racist."

The myth that "Barry Soetoro" attended a madrassa in Indonesia has been sufficiently debunked, but the only hard evidence about Obama's religious affiliation as a child is his listing as a Muslim on his elementary school registration. Friendly journalists and the Obama campaign usually disappear this document with a lot of hand-waving about how Obama's step-father Lolo Soetoro occasionally had a beer and wasn't really a "devout" Muslim, but Soetoro's spotty attendance at the local mosque doesn't mean he also ignored the core Muslim requirement of Salah, ritual prayer performed five times every day. Did little Barry pray beside his step-father, or did he somehow stand outside the rhythm of everyday life in an Indonesian household?

The story of Barack Obama's church in Chicago is so famous that even the hicks in Hickville know it backward and forward, and Eli Sastrow's pitiful rhetorical tricks probably can't sell a preacher like Jeremiah Wright and a couple of patron saints like James Cone and Louis Farrakhan as witnesses that Barack Obama has much in common with the sort of "Christian family man" you might encounter in an auto shop or grocery store in rural Ohio.

How far did Barack Obama ever subscribe to the semi-Christian black-power ideology of James Cone and Jeremiah Wright? Whatever his other motivations may have been, Barack Obama joined Trinity Church when it was politically convenient to belong to its powerful congregation, and he left it when it wasn't.

So the question of Barack Obama's religion is significantly more complicated than the Washington Post portrays it, and their silly division between Christian "family values" and gay Muslim racism dissolves into more difficult issues like the relative power of childhood training compared to Barack Obama's formerly convenient membership in a powerful congregation.

Does a politically convenient association with the black-power "Christianity" of Jeremiah Wright really run deeper than Barack Obama's childhood immersion in the rhythms of Islam?

The real situation is probably even more shadowy than any division, and it may be that Barack Obama chose the ethnocentric ideology of Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago precisely because it resonated so deeply with his experience of Islam as a child in Lolo Soetoro's house in Jakarta.

The liberal blogosphere has been ignoring bad polls for Obama and celebrating every uptick. What else is new?

But for some strange reason, a huge chunk of the country isn't ready to accept the self-evident wonderfulness of "the most likely Democratic candidate for President according to non-binding expressions of preference by super-delegates," and whatever momentary lead Barack Obama attains in one poll can quickly disappear in the next.

It isn't exactly what you would expect for a wonderful, wonderful candidate running against a psychotic dinosaur like John McCain, a Republican Party endorsed by a whopping 22% of likely voters, and the most unpopular President in history.

Survey USA and Rasmussen are telling the same sad story about the probable division of electoral votes at the moment, with many states too close to call:

Survey USA: Obama 253, McCain 258
Rasmussen:  Obama 221, McCain 238

How is this possible? According to Obama's disciples, the only possible reason for voting against Obama is racism, and it looks like more than half the voters are racists one week and enlightened the next.

Racists one week and enlightened the next? It's just another mystery in the incomprehensible (but wonderful!) candidacy of Barack Obama!

I keep trying to like Barack Obama, but I can't like him the same way suckers for his rhetoric and his cuteness on TV like him, so I keep trying to like him some other way.

Lately it occurred to me to try to like Barack Obama the way his personal friends like him! Who better to reveal the likeable human qualities of someone I usually think of as a hypocritical android?

A google search for "Obama's friend" wasn't very promising. Apart from numerous right-wing references to Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and and Father Pfleger... two hate-mongers, a crook, and a former terrorist... the best search result was Marty Nesbitt, who actually plays basketball with Obama, but Nesbitt is so useful as a fundraiser and conduit to the billionaire Pritzkers that I ended up back at square one, with the image of a manipulative machine and his army of tools.

Then I found Keith Kakugawa!

ABC News has the money quote from Dreams From My Father:

In his best-selling autobiography, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., writes movingly about his high school best friend, whom he calls "Ray." In his first year at Hawaii's elite Punahou School, then-9th-grader "Barry" Obama was befriended by Ray, who was two years older. "Despite the difference in age, we'd fallen into an easy friendship, due in no small part to the fact that together we made up almost half of Punahou's black high school population," Obama wrote. "I enjoyed his company; he had a warmth and brash humor. ..."

Keith Kakugawa is "Ray!" This is my idea of a friend: Keith and Barry hung out, they partied together, they had heart-to-heart talks! You can't do that stuff with a stinking android!

So once upon a time Barack Obama really did have a friend, instead of just another tool, and what kind of friend is Barack Obama?

The Wall Street Journal describes a very disappointing reunion of the two high-school buddies:

Sen. Barack Obama had just come off the Senate floor last Thursday, rushing to get to New Hampshire for a weekend of campaigning for president, when his office patched through a call to his cellphone. On the other end was a long-lost high-school friend, Keith Kakugawa, calling from a pay phone in a rundown part of Los Angeles. Mr. Kakugawa was homeless and fresh from a California state prison facility after a third drug-related conviction.

Mr. Kakugawa was destitute and homeless. At a Los Angeles social-service agency he met a past acquaintance, an aspiring rap-music writer and performer, Jason Myles, who works as "Bobby Bang." He moved into the rapper's car -- a battered, dulled-silver 1989 Mazda 626, with nearly 156,000 miles on the odometer. At night they park on a street blocks from Skid Row, recline the front seats to sleep and share a quilt. They say they've pawned audio equipment, to help buy additional minutes for a shared cellphone.

At Mr. Obama's suggestion, Mr. Kakugawa says, he called Devorah Adler, a campaign researcher who maintains contacts with Obama family and friends who might get press inquiries, to advise them and act as a go-between. Tensions rose when Mr. Kakugawa asked for some money to be wired to him via Western Union, according to both him and Ms. Adler. Ms. Adler brought in senior adviser Robert Gibbs, and together they phoned Mr. Kakugawa last Saturday.

"Sen. Obama really does want to help," Mr. Gibbs told Mr. Kakugawa, according to both men's recollection. The advisers suggested Mr. Kakugawa get help from social-service agencies, and that the Obama office would help with that. But he would not get money, Mr. Gibbs said.

The exchange left Mr. Kakugawa upset. "Everybody's just abandoned me," he says.

ABC News has an update:

But Obama campaign officials says Kakugawa's comments were not as he is now portraying them. They say he threatened to tell negative stories about the senator to the media if money was not wired to him.

Since Kakugawa talked with ABC News, he's fallen on even harder times. Though the California Department of Corrections denies it, he has heard there's a warrant out for his arrest because of the extortion claims by the Obama campaign. His friend Jason's car broke down on the Interstate 10 highway. And he regrets how everything has gone down with his friend.

"He doesn't know realistically that if he just talked to me, took the time to just sit down -- I would just like to say 'Hey look, your campaign's great, but you need to do more or show more,'" Kakugawa says. "Whether I'd be that person who shows the world, 'Hey, he does really care about people that have had this and that,' that's what I would like have conveyed. Barry really does care about people. The people around him don't -- Win or lose, Barry will be able to get in contact with me."

So Barack Obama's best friend from high school is broke and homeless, and Barack Obama offers him directions to the nearest welfare office! "He would not get money." Not a penny from the multi-millionaire Barack Obama! Not even a job sweeping out campaign headquarters!

Thanks for nothing, you heartless son-of-a-bitch!

So I gave up my project of liking Barack Obama, but I'll probably still vote for the heartless son-of-a-bitch anyway, because a vote for Nader is the same as a vote for the psycho dinosaur John McCain, and a vote for McCain is a vote to keep running with the Bush/Cheney agenda of torture and genocide forever, and although Democratic collaborators with torture and genocide like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton keep voting to fund torture and genocide again and again and again, apparently they want to gradually phase out torture and genocide, or at least some of it, and that's why I'm still a goddamned Democrat!

On the surface there's Barack Obama's self-serving rhetoric about "party unity," and one millimeter deeper there's the reality of his divisive campaign:

A former bundler to Hillary Clinton just called in to tell me that Barack Obama's selection of Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff to the campaign's eventual vice presidential nominee is the "biggest fuck you I have ever seen in politics."

The donor, speaking on background, said that everyone in Clinton circles knows the two have hard feelings towards one another and haven't spoken since Clinton removed Solis Doyle as campaign manager, and that Clinton loyalists view her with deep suspicion and believe that she is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.

On the surface there's Obama's communications director Robert Gibbs expressing surprise at the negative reaction of Hillary Clinton's friends to hiring Solis Doyle, and one millimeter deeper there's the usual reality:

Hillary Clinton's camp was seething yesterday over what it sees as a snub by Barack Obama in appointing a former staffer with whom she has fallen out to a key post in his campaign team.

"This is a stick in the eye to her," one of her inner circle said, adding that it effectively ruled Clinton out as his vice-presidential running mate.

There's really only one dot to connect in this story: Solis Doyle provides background for Vanity Fair to slime Bill Clinton, and a few weeks later she gets a plum job for her beautiful future with Barack Obama.

Obama's "principles" won't let him pay $10 to a kid in Philadephia for passing out flyers for his campaign, but for major political players Obama can always find 30 pieces of silver to pay off a Democratic Judas like Patti Solis Doyle, or an endorsement to pay off a Blue Dog super-delegate like John Barrow, and it's just frosting on the cake if he can simultaneously screw over a black progressive candidate like Regina Thomas.

Meet the Press, January 4, 2004:

MR. RUSSERT: Dick Gephardt, one of Governor Dean's opponents, had this to say. "There's a pattern with Governor Dean...first, say something indefensible. Then deny you ever said it. Then when it's proven you said it, don't tell anybody why you said it. And then go and say it all over again." Bill Safire, is that a good formula?

Is that a good formula?

Yes, Tim, it's a wonderful formula, just like your formula for bashing Howard Dean every chance you got, and your formula for tossing softballs to Rumsfeld and Cheney in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and your formula for recycling every buzz-word that ever buzzed around the Beltway into meaningless "questions."

It was a good enough formula to produce slightly higher ratings than your idiot clones on the other networks, and nothing else really mattered.

All us good little Democrats are working night and day to restore party unity, but some prominent progressive websites apparently haven't gotten the message.

Paul Woodward at War in Context was already a progressive way back when Markos Moulitsas was still running around in a Ronald Reagan beanie, but now Woodward has turned against the "presumptive" or "very likely based on non-binding expressions of preference by super-delegates" nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States:

Yesterday was the day the "change" bubble burst.  Obama's performance at AIPAC shows that his grasp of Middle East politics has yet to rise to the level of George Bush's! That's an incredible thing to have to say (especially for someone who still intends to vote Democrat) but what Obama demonstrated was the myopia of a candidate who has thrown principle to the wind and decided he will say anything to secure votes and donations. His was a polished performance in the politics of business-as-usual, burnished with a genuflection to Zionism that was utterly uncalled for.

How did it happen?

I can only suppose that having become so deeply enmeshed in Hillary Clinton's psyche, Obama decided he'd couldn't hold back in parroting her down to a T if he was to win over her rightwing Jewish supporters. Having made that choice, he then thought, what the hell? I'll see if I can pull in the whole Likudnik crowd as well.

Barack Obama is "enmeshed in Hillary Clinton's psyche!" She can probably make him quack like a duck! "Yes quack quack We Can!"

This is an unintentionally hilarious new low in the game of "Blame it on Hillary Clinton."  

...but the Palestinians aren't laughing.